. Spinning .

Perception and impact of a story is often dependent upon the mood of the reader as well as background, beliefs, hopes, knowledge and fears.  Today was the perfect day to read a section where Stephen, along with his schoolmates, is on retreat and listening to the rector delivering a sermon on Heaven and Hell.  I especially liked Hell, and just need to share some of it with you.  My background is Catholic so maybe that explains a part of it, but I assure you that the rector’s version of the afterlife is not quite what I’d learned from the more gentle Sisters of Nazareth nor the priests of our good parish.

However, it clearly explains why Stephen Dedalus is scared shitless over his bouts of lustful thinking.  I have to tell you that this whole eighteen-page segment made the whole book for me.  I also have to tell you that I often laughed out loud and just thoroughly enjoyed the reading.  You can wonder why, but I did.  I’ll excerpt here a small portion, but a goodly amount of the sermon is available to read here , for the curious, with thanks to The Literature Network which has the whole of Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man along with many, many fine pieces of literature.

— Our earthly fire again, no matter how fierce or widespread it may be, is always of a limited extent; but the lake of fire in hell is boundless, shoreless and bottomless. It is on record that the devil himself, when asked the question by a certain soldier, was obliged to confess that if a whole mountain were thrown into the burning ocean of hell it would be burned up In an instant like a piece of wax. And this terrible fire will not afflict the bodies of the damned only from without, but each lost soul will be a hell unto itself, the boundless fire raging in its very vitals. O, how terrible is the lot of those wretched beings! The blood seethes and boils in the veins, the brains are boiling in the skull, the heart in the breast glowing and bursting, the bowels a red-hot mass of burning pulp, the tender eyes flaming like molten balls.

And what is Joyce’s purpose in dedicating almost twenty pages to this sermon?  That’s where it gets interesting.  While I might laugh with glee, Joyce (as I found out by cheating a quick peek at the background of this story and of the author when I was trying to find a place online that had this available so I didn’t have to type it all nor shortchange you) perhaps was severely affected by his own Catholic upbringing.  Might I even venture that while he could be placing this here as a sarcastic comment or even derisive attack on the Church, he may indeed harbor fears that even adult intellectual thinking cannot override.

There is no metaphor in this passage, nor much in the book except by way of purposeful vagueness; this sermon is told straight out in all its brutal form of hell being hell.  Oh yes, and with the adamant assurance of accuracy. 

Scary, huh?  Yet still, I laughed.  Why?  Because God Himself couldn’t come up with the kind of hell created by the zealot.  Only the flawed human mind could imagine and build this type of evil.

Ah, so a few pages more answer the question:  ’tis the fever of schoolboy lust and all those delicious dirty thoughts that cause a young man’s blood to gush through his system to pool in his penis.

It was too much for him.  He closed his eyes, surrendering himself to her, body and mind, conscious of nothing in the world but the dark pressure of her softly parting lips.  They pressed upon his brain as upon his lips as though they were the vehicle of a vague speech; and between them he felt an unknown and timid pressure, darker than the swoon of sin, softer than sound or odour.  (p. 101)

I suspected it had something to do with this, remembering his watching a young woman after a party.  But for me, perhaps in reading it in this time period, it was a bit overdramatic (but what do I know, I’m a girl) in the leading up to this point where he beds a prostitute.  Also a bit anticlimactic (forgive the pun) in the culmination of copulation.  I was with the writing until "softer than sound or odour," which, while it is an excellent simile, just kind of destroys the mood with the word "odour."

Though I am used to period reading, for some reason, despite Joyce’s elegant language and innovative presentation of narrative structure, I am finding it hard to really care much for Stephen.  There was a bit about his embarrassment over his family’s financial losses and social status, and although I understand how the times and in particular (especially after reading Robert Graves’ Goodbye to All That) the educational institution would precipitate this feeling, it bothered me some. 

Maybe Boethius–who seems to have almost daily relevance lately–is exerting his influence.

Boy, you think you know someone…

My image of Stephen up to this point was of a rather scared yet very alert and sensitive young lad (unknowing of the age, and keeping in mind the era), who was somehow feeling very much alone in whatever world–home or school–he resided.  Maybe it is because I am reading three books at once and not able to really focus in on things lately to become totally enmeshed in his life, I was rather surprised by the following excerpt (with a writerly note here, that I found it a wonderful bit of style to bring us into Stephen’s mind [by the narrator’s guidance] as he is with his father who is telling Stephen stories of his own youth–how the mind wanders when bored!):

He heard the sob pass loudly down his father’s throat and opened his eyes with a nervous impulse.  The sunlight breaking suddenly on his sight turned the sky and clouds into a fantastic world of sombre masses with lakelike spaces of dark rosy light.  His very brain was sick and powerless.  He could scarcely interpret the letters of the signboards of the shops.  By his monstrous way of life he seemed to have put himself beyond the limits of reality.  Nothing moved him or spoke to him from the real world unless he heard in it an echo of the infuriated cries within him.  He could respond to no earthly or human appeal, dumb and insensible to the call of the summer and gladness and companionship, wearied and dejected by his father’s voice.  He could scarcely recognise as his his own thoughts, and repeated slowly to himself:  –I am Stephen Dedalus.  (p. 92)

Well Stephen, neither could I.  Although I must admit that I can well relate to the feeling.  I just accepted him without looking deeper into the subtlety that James Joyce has given his reader.  Perhaps I am oblivious to cries of pain.  "He looked normal" is often heard at the crime scene when neighbors are discussing the suspect.  What did I miss about Stephen?  I do wonder if the growing of character in this story was not read into as seriously as I might have given the matter.

But then again, people constantly surprise us.